My sister works in forensics/pathology, and she has confirmed that my family has a gene that means we process caffeine a lot faster than other people.

I’m not sure whether I have that particular gene or not. I do drink coffee (usually two cups a day, one in the morning with prayer and one in the afternoon, after lunch). If I have more than two cups, all the rest are decaf.

Coffee is a wonderful gift. Like all things in this life, it has some negatives, and it is best drunk in moderation, but coffee provides so much good

• a pick-me-up of a kind, if needed
• a sense of routine and comfort, so necessary to our human nature in this vale of tears
• community, friendship, and relationship around “coffee dates”
• a chance for needed breaks in the midst of work, to refresh and come back ready to push through and do what needs to be done
• an expression of culture, what we all share from a common society and expression of a way of being human. So many different cultures do so many different things with coffee.

When you consider all these aspects of coffee-its relationship to culture, community, routine and structure in life, cycles of energy and tiredness-it really does become a symbol of being human–at least for a large portion of the western world.

And that’s cool, because being human (as I would say, being made in the image and likeness of God) is the most precious thing imaginable.

So here’s to coffee!